Perhaps the closest missed chance came when a homicide detective
spotted, but failed to rescue, Smart, who was taken from her Salt
Lake City home at knifepoint a decade ago when she was 14.

Smart's captors, Brian David
Mitchell and his wife Wanda Barzee, would often put her in
bizarre disguises and take her around Salt Lake City, where she
was too terrified to scream or run for help.

Once at a public library, a man even came over and introduced
himself as a homicide detective, according to The New Yorker
story. Police had received concerned calls from people who were
worried that she might be a kidnapping victim, he told them. The
cop asked Mitchell and Barzee to take off Smart's veil.

Smart was "dizzy with hope and anticipation and gut-wrenching
fear," she writes in her new
memoir. Barzee put tightened her hand on Smart's leg. As
Margaret Talbot writes in The New Yorker, "The fear won out."

She stayed quiet as Mitchell explained that his religion forbade
him from revealing his "daughter's" face to a strange man.
"Officer, if she were the person you were looking for, why would
she just sit there?" Mitchell said, according to Smart's account.
The detective left, and Smart felt lower than ever. She says her
fear made her compliant.

Smart was finally rescued after nine months, after a smart cop
separated her from Mitchell and his Barzee before asking if she'd
been kidnapped. "She's too scared to even answer," she recalled
the officer saying. "You've got to get her by herself."